When I started writing this blog, I accepted the #100DaysToOffload challenge and did so with full strenght, writing a post almost everyday. I decided to create my blog at the beginning of February and I did a total of 22 posts. Some of them were barely decent, and some of them I am still kinda proud of.

While I slowed down a bit during the rest of the year, I think I will still be able to complete the challenge during the next 2 months I still have to write random stuff. So, you can expect to see a lot more of them during the time I still have left.

I have to say, I am very thankful I decided to write a lot of the stuff I did, because I would not even remember a lot of the topics and cool things that happened if it wasn’t because of this blog. So I am going to mentions a couple of things I am proud I did this year, other than this blog.

Leaving text processors for plain text and PDFs

During this year I managed to finally embrace a new way to work with text, using Markdown, Pandoc, Org-Mode, Neovim, Joplin and a lot of other tools that I started using that allowed me to stop writing using Office and other simlar software.

This really allowed me to finish homework a lot quicker and take notes in a comfier way. Thanks to pdf’s I was still able to present my homework in an acceptable way (for my teachers). And Even tho I still have some work to do with templating and other details I still haven’t figured out, taking plain text notes is just great and simple.

Improving my (and my family’s) security online

I managed to start using a better password manager that works for my needs and quirks, I changed a lot of passwords that were duplicates or weak, I deleted dozens of accounts that I no longer used and were just taking space in random servers. Took the time to email terrible services that did not provide easy ways to delete their account. I finally managed to enable 2 factor authentication in every possible place that I managed to find.

Recently, I also managed to do the same thing, admittedly a bit less thoroughly, to my parents and a sibling.

Participating in Ludum Dare 48, venturing into new videogame genres

Lately I have been a lot less involved in the game development world, I am still part of some great communities, but I have not made any significant games or updates.

However, this year I still managed to participate in Ludum Dare, one of the biggest game jam events. The theme was Deeper and deeper, and my game, while not quite complete, still was a blast to game and share with everyone, get some ratings and learn a lot. I think it has quite a lot of potential, but I still haven’t worked more on it like most of the games I’ve done before.

I also got to make a text adventure game for a school project, that I never got to share publicly. It did not really have quite an objective or story to it, but I might release it sometime soon just to have something more in my Itch.io profile.

Programming and Raspberry Pi projects

Outside of game development, this year I also managed to learn a lot of stuff about how computers work. I learned more about bash scripting, doing a script to automate the creation of posts here, adding a template, date and such automatically.

I also took an Embedded Systems class where I got a raspberry pi and did stuff from controlling servomotors to using web servers and building sites with MariaDB databases and other things using a LAMP stack.

Recently, I also managed to host my own Nextcloud instance and using Zerotier to access it from basically anywhere.

Learning Inkscape and contributing to FOSS

Another great thing I managed to do was learning Inkscape and designing a lot of icons for some open source projects, especially the Arcticons Icon pack and, as of late, the Delta Icon pack, which are some of the greatest icons packs for Android that are currently in development.

I have probably made more than 300 icons and I am really happy I am part of this. It has become the main thing I do when I got free time, other than writing blogs or fiddling around with my computer, and the good thing is that it looks a lot more productive to my parents.

The only reason the bug me is that they always ask me how much I get paid, and I always have to say I do it for free. but if you wanna prove me wrong, you can always donate to me via BAT (Brave rewards) or Monero, so check my home page to support me!

Wrapping up

I am really grateful for this year, thank God despite the madness and crazy things that are going on around the world, I managed to have a really good year, outside of school stuff, which is always a little annoying, but not even that was actually bad, since I managed to get excellent grades and if I keep up my current score, I won’t have to do a Thesis or exam to pass uiniversity, which is kinda epic!

I hope your year went great, or hey, if you had a bad time, be hopeful the next year will be better, I know sometimes things seem like they will be terrible, but keep it up, and things will improve.

You can see most of these mentioned topics being talked about in previous posts of my blog, so make sure to check all of them if you are interested and you have the time. Tags could also help you find them faster 😉.

This has been day 65 of #100DaysToOffload